NeighborhoodCoincidences

Two belated discoveries about events near where I live:

Last week Theodore Brewster Taylor passed away at the age of 79. Ted Taylor was a nuclear bomb designer turned antinuclear activist and writer, profiled by John McPhee in The Curve of Binding Energy (1974 - see WorldTradeCenter (11 Sep 2001)). Unbeknownst to me, for the past few years Taylor was living in a nursing home just down the road from here — a facility where Paulette and I have occasionally taken our kids to play piano for the residents ...
Last week my neighbor across the street was wearing a tee-shirt bearing the logo of the federal bureaucracy where I work. I complimented him on it — and he revealed that, more than forty years ago, he and a colleague designed and crafted the terracotta eagle from that logo which is embedded in the entranceway floor of the main headquarters building. They fabricated the quarter-inch iron border in their shop. For the past 20+ I've walked, unwittingly, across their work ...

Small world!

(see also LongTails (14 Feb 2000), CoincidentalTaxonomy (19 Oct 2001), CoincidentalTaxonomy2 (14 May 2002), ErdosNumberz (13 Jul 2002), ...)